February 09, 2013:
Faced with a flight emergency, a Polish pilot pulled off a remarkable feat of airman-ship that saved hundreds of lives and made its way into aviation history. Actual video shot inside the plane’s cabin show passengers in the moments before captain Tad Wrona made his incredible landing.

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Back in 1970 I was in Minneapolis for a product training school with Honeywell. One evening in the hotel I was watching the news when a bulletin came on regarding a Northwest Airlines flight in trouble and coming in to the MSP airport for an emergency landing. It was the same situation - no landing gear. The landing was just as smooth and uneventful as the video.

What was striking about the Minneapolis situation is that the pilot was on his last flight and would be retiring as soon as he landed in Minneapolis. What a way to end a career, but that pilot with all his experience was in exactly the right place to handle that situation.

When I was en engineering apprentice at what was then English Electric Aviation, we had several wheels up landings with the Lightning fighter before a design flaw in the system was discovered.

The were much more interesting than airliners doing it because the Lightning was quite tall, due to its center-line engines installed on top of each other and had shoulder-mounted wings. It also landed normally at about 170 knots. If the flaps had failed also. that went up to about 220.

The reason we saw so many was that the airplanes were built at a factory where the runway was long enough to take off from, but not to land back on. It was only about 25 miles to the main test center airfield, so they landed there. It had a runway of about 18,000 feet length, which ended up at a river estuary.

Interestingly, none of the wheels-up landings went off the end. The braking effect of grinding down the fuselage on the concrete was better than the wheel brakes.